Category: publishing

“Chicago has one. So do Malibu and San Diego, Denver and Poughkeepsie, Seattle and Philadelphia … a One Book, One City program, in which an entire community reads the same work and launches into a series of discussions, lectures, readings, and occasionally film screenings.” Yet “Boston, which has rested comfortably on its haute literary perch for ages, has never had one,” and nobody wants to take the lead in starting one.

“James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the most famously banned books of the 20th century. But while the US legal system has basically given up on the regulation of sexually explicit literature, … the creators of Ulysses Seen, a Web-comic adaptation of Joyce’s masterwork, had to remove nudity from its pages in order to win Apple’s approval to sell the work to iPad owners.”

“With a goal of establishing a national Bible museum of great depth and size, the evangelical Christian family behind the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores has been spending heavily to amass a collection that has set dealers buzzing in the staid world of rare books. Specialists estimate the family has bought illuminated, or decorated, manuscripts, Torahs, papyri and other works worth $20 million to $40 million.”

Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate, has dismissed suggestions from consultancy KPMG that libraries are “not very much used” and should be run by volunteers as foolhardy, outlandish and potentially catastrophic.

“The trouble, perhaps, is that this definition of ‘young writer’ … muddies our understanding of how truly original, enduring fiction comes to be written. Worse, it threatens to infantilize our writers, reducing them to the condition of permanent apprentices who grind steadily toward ‘maturity’ as they prepare to write their ‘breakthrough’ books.”

“You write differently when you know you can’t dodge explaining yourself by fobbing the task off on someone more eloquent or better informed. You have to express what you want to say more completely, and you have to think harder about what information ought to be included and what’s merely peripheral.”

“Last year Nobel laureate Derek Walcott pulled out of the election for Oxford professor of poetry; now the only woman standing in this year’s contest, poet Paula Claire, has withdrawn in protest over what she is describing as ‘serious flaws’ in the election process that she believes have pushed best-known candidate Geoffrey Hill ahead of all other contenders.”

“One of the guilty pleasures of an actual, ink-on-paper book is the possibility of marking it up–underlining salient passages, making notes in the margins, dog-earing a page. While it’s true that some electronic book platforms for the iPad allow highlighting,” and some e-readers “allow you to type notes, they barely take advantage of being digital.”

“Several unpublished manuscripts by Stieg Larsson, the Swedish crime author who died before his Millennium trilogy became a global cult hit, have surfaced in Stockholm, Sweden’s national library said Tuesday.”

“The Underwood discs, scheduled to appear twice a year, [represent] part of the growing resistance to the dematerialisation of art. By emphasising tactility, scarcity (each issue is limited to 1,000 copies) and physical beauty, it offers something that can’t be digitally replicated.”